Here in Berkeley – as well as in the other top American universities, I guess – there are a number of super cool things that I would import to the Italian universities. Among these, there is not what happened today, though.

Seminar on Robust decision making and deep decarbonization. Towards the end, a University employee comes in and gives an alert from the Berkeley Police to the seminar responsible: apparently, an armed robbery suspect is moving around Unit 1 (one of the students’ residential complexes, which is close to the Campus), so the population is invited to take shelter in their homes or to stay away from the area.

Not so nice! However, the atmosphere is quite “relaxed”, there’s no panic at all: the employee does not have a worried expression and the professor himself reads the notice quite in a non-serious way. I assume that this is a kind of situation that perhaps cannot be classified as “normal”, but that is probably not so unusual, and maybe there is more zeal than required (which is good, anyway). Indeed, the whole system seems to be very efficient, since everyone receives a text message or an email from the University. However, all the participants take note and apparently no one is willing to look for potential problems going to the mentioned area. In the meantime, a helicopter has taken off and is patrolling the area.

Now, the point is that among the participants in the seminar, there is one researcher who had planned to go back home quite soon for once – i.e. after the seminar – but who unluckily lives very close to Unit 1 🙂 Well, it means that I will go back to my office to work until my standard time…

As you can see from the Police tweets, the situation gets back to normality quite soon, even if no details are provided: has the suspect been captured? Above all, was a real suspect actually there? I mean, I guess he did exist, but was he really an armed robber, or a bad guy in general? Who knows: several hours later, no additional info was available on the web yet.

However, a similar episode, that we can label as very “American” – although very mild, fortunately – could not be missing in my experience here in Berkeley, apparently! And of course, let’s hope we won’t go any further along this direction 🙂